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Asbestos victims remembered

Lynn Bruner pinned a snapshot of her dad, Ted Luckham, to a memorial board set up at the Dow People Place just before Saturday’s Walk to Remember Victims of Asbestos.

“I miss him deeply,” the Courtright residents said. Luckham died in 1999, at age 69, of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.

Bruner said the Imperial Oil Worker only lived long enough to know one of his five grandsons.

Others in the crowd of 525 or more at the second annual walk in Sarnia carried photos of loved ones lost to asbestos-caused illness, wore T-shirts honouring victims and carried signs calling for the mineral fibre to be banned in Canada.

They included Faye Voisey and other relatives of Wayne Lightfoot, another Imperial Oil worker, who died at age 72 of mesothelioma.

“He said they wrapped the pipes, with their bare hands, with the asbestos,” Voisey said.

“It was a very awful death.”

Leah Nielsen and Stacy Cattran organized the walk after they lost their father, who worked at one time in Chemical Valley, to mesothelioma.

They’ve joined with the long-standing Victims of Chemical Valley group to call on Canada to ban asbestos.

Activists celebrated recently when a newly-elected provincial government in Quebec pledged to withdraw a loan aimed at restarting an asbestos mine there but Cattran told the crowd at Saturday’s walk that the fight isn’t finished.

She repeated the sisters’ call for a public inquiry into Canada’s role as a supporter of the asbestos industry.

“I want what we all want,” she said, “justice for victims and jail time for perpetrators.”

The walk attracted participants and speakers from across North America, and overseas.

Pat Martin, an NDP MP from Winnipeg, said “I hang my head in shame” because of Canada’s role as an asbestos exporter and “cheerleader” for the industry.

“Our country’s position on asbestos is morally and ethically reprehensible and can’t be tolerated.”

Eric Jonckheere, co-president of the Belgium association for asbestos victims, told the crowd how his parents and two of his brothers died because of the asbestos carried home on his father’s work clothes.

“Most of the asbestos I have in my lungs is from Canada,” he said.

“Asbestos is a killer. It’s killing over 200,000 people a year.

Jonckheere met Nielsen and Cattran at a conference they attended following last year’s walk in Sarnia.

“I promised to them if they ever organized a second march, I would come,” he said.

Barry Castleman, an environmental scientist from Maryland, Dr. Tushar Joshi, who has been fighting against asbestos use in his native India, and Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley also spoke.